A friend of ours has been on a few dates with a girl.  I asked what she was like, and he answered with adjectives like "sweet" and "nice."  I said that was all beside the point.  I needed to get to the heart of the matter: What is her stance on Charles Krauthammer?  Because really, that's all I need to know to make new friends...

Show me your feelings on Krauthammer and I'll show you your future.

What Fox did is not just create a venue for alternative opinion. It created an alternate reality.

A few years ago, I was on a radio show with a well-known political reporter who lamented the loss of a pristine past in which the whole country could agree on what the facts were, even if they disagreed on how to interpret and act upon them. All that was gone now. The country had become so fractured we couldn't even agree on what reality was. What she meant was that the day in which the front page of The New York Times was given scriptural authority everywhere was gone, shattered by the rise of Fox News.

What left me slack-jawed was the fact that she, like the cohort of mainstream journalists she represented so perfectly, was so ideologically blinkered that she could not fathom the plain fact that the liberal media were presenting the news and the world through a particular lens. The idea that it was particular, and that there might be competing ones, perhaps even superior ones, was beyond her ken.

That's why Fox News is so resented. It altered the intellectual and ideological landscape of America. It gave not only voice but also legitimacy to a worldview that had been utterly excluded from the mainstream media.

Posted by: Sarah at 02:43 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 You know I love me some Charles.  I hope she didn't say, "Charles who?" because that would be disappointing. 

Posted by: Guard Wife at June 10, 2009 10:20 PM (uDVFe)

2

Love the Hammer!

 

BTW, substitute Sarah Palin for Fox News in the last paragraph and it's just as true.

Posted by: tim at June 11, 2009 08:03 AM (nno0f)

3 GW (not Bush!),

I'm pretty sure most people I know would ask, "Charles who?" So for me the question is: What is your stance on Obama?

It's not all I need to know to make friends, but it's a start.

The quality of the answer matters too. Disliking Obama is not enough. Why is he 'bad'? I don't want to befriend conspiracy theorists. I want people who can recognize his badness on the basis of publicly available evidence, not speculation. What Obama thinks, what he does behind closed doors is unknown. What I see and hear is awful enough for me.

I have mixed feelings about the idea of Fox "creat[ing] an alternate reality." The media should reflect reality, not create an alternate reality - a fantasy to reinforce the delusions of the audience. Which media reflect reality? Fox? The rest of the MSM? Neither? (I vote for TTG.)

I think Krauthammer meant to say that Fox created an alternate window on reality - another way of seeing things - another "lens".

I don't think Fox "gave ... legitimacy to a worldview that had been utterly excluded from the mainstream media." The worldview's legitimacy - correctness - should be independent of Fox. But I do realize that for many people, legitimacy is based on What Other People Think, and if a worldview is on a national network, that means Other People Think Like That, so it's now 'legitimate'. I heard it on Fox / CNN / wherever, so it must be true! Too many confuse the messenger with the message.  Messengers like Fox are important, but the message is still more important.

Then again, it doesn't matter if people don't understand the message. It's not fun to be Not Sure.

Posted by: Amritas at June 11, 2009 11:30 AM (+nV09)

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